Rival Koreas’ leaders face high stakes at historic summit

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – It may lack the punch of President Donald Trump’s vow to unleash “fire and fury” and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s “nuclear button” boasts, but the stakes will be high on Friday when Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in sit down on the southern side of the no man’s land that forms the world’s most heavily armed border.

Kim may never abandon the nuclear weapons that he claims are all that stand between him and annihilation, but if the Koreas and the United States are going to begin step-

ping away from what, until a few months ago, looked like a real possibility of nuclear war, then Kim and Moon must lay the foundation with a successful summit of their own. The fate of a planned Trump-Kim meeting, possibly next month, is also linked to what happens Friday.

The rival Koreas’ long, bitter history will provide skeptics with ample fodder to doubt that any real deal can be reached. Since a tenuous Korean War cease-fire took hold in 1953, every major initiative to settle the world’s last remaining Cold War standoff has eventually stalled.

So what’s the goal? What would “success” look like?

Some sort of progress on nuclear weapons, even it falls short of a “breakthrough,” headlines the list, but there’s also, from the North Korean perspective, the “problem” of nearly 30,000 heavily armed US troops stationed in the South, and the failure to agree on a peace treaty formally ending the war, a situation that the North routinely says creates the hostility that makes its own nuclear weapons necessary.

Here is a look at how we got here, what the two sides want, and the chances that a real deal can be achieved:

From threats to talks Moon, a liberal who cut his political teeth as a lead architect of a previous government’s “sunshine policy” of engagement with North Korea, came into office last year hoping for better ties with the North. Instead, one of the most heated North Korean weapons-testing outbursts in recent memory forced him to follow Washington in ramping up pressure on the North.

Then, in January, Kim began a charm offensive by declaring that North Korea had “achieved the goal of completing our state nuclear force” and opening the door to diplomacy. Analysts believe that North Korean technicians still have some work to do to make this a fact, but the important thing, from Moon’s viewpoint, was the shift to engagement.

The Olympic Games in the South Korean mountain resort of Pyeongchang in February provided the perfect backdrop for that diplomacy to flourish. Kim sent his sister to Pyeongchang with a summit invitation for Moon, and the two Koreas marched together at the opening ceremony and formed a single women’s hockey team.

During a visit by a high-level South Korean official to North Korea, Kim reportedly announced that he wouldn’t need nuclear weapons if his government’s security could be guaranteed and external threats were removed. He also reportedly offered to meet with Trump and stop weapons testing as the diplomacy plays out.

After learning from South Korea of Kim’s offer to meet, Trump shocked the world by accepting.

Who wants what? Here’s where it gets complicated.

North Korea may want to use its new nuclear muscle, and the legitimacy it believes a Trump meeting will bestow, to win a peace treaty that ends the Korean War and eventually drives US forces off the Korean Peninsula. It presumably hopes that will pave the way, in time, for a unified Korea that’s led by the North and is beholden to neither the United States nor China.

That’s one strain of thinking for the North’s long-term dream, anyway; under current circumstances it’s not likely that Washington would leave, given the bloodshed that occurred the last time North Korea thought there was a vacuum of power on the peninsula in 1950 and invaded the South.

In the short term, the skeptical argument goes that if the North can dangle disarmament in a series of meetings that follows these two summits, it could win more time – and an easing of crippling sanctions – to push forward in perfecting its weapons, while also collecting aid and concessions for nuclear promises that will never be met.

Seoul, on the other hand, wants to control the process, especially after the last year, when Trump repeatedly threatened a war that would overwhelmingly kill Koreans.

“We are preparing to take the leading role in a great transition in world history – a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the establishment of a permanent peace and the sustainable development of relations between the South and North,” Moon said recently.